Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka Human Rights

Human Rights Concerns

Sri Lanka is facing a catastrophic economic crisis with severe shortages in essential medicines, food and cooking gas.  Fuel shortages have resulted in power outages of up to 13 hours per day.  Inflation has sharply increased the cost of living.  The government has defaulted on external debt due to its lack of revenue (caused in part by COVID lockdowns and pre-pandemic tax cuts).  Thousands have protested the government’s mismanagement of the economy.  In response, the government has used unlawful force against protesters and attempted to stifle dissent through arbitrary arrests, detention and torture.  On May 6, Amnesty issued a briefing, “From Bad to Worse:  Rights Under Attack During Sri Lanka’s Economic Crisis.”  Following massive protests on July 9, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country a few days later and then resigned.  The Acting President Ranil Wickremesinghe was elected as President by Parliament on July 20.  While Acting President, Mr. Wickremesinghe promulgated emergency regulations giving the security forces sweeping powers of arrest without due process safeguards.  In the early hours of July 22, a massive operation by the security forces forcibly removed protesters sleeping in tents at a main protest site outside the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo.  Amnesty issued public statements regarding the emergency regulations and the attack on the peaceful protesters.  Links to those public statements and the May 6 briefing are given below.

The situation of human rights in Sri Lanka needs to be understood in the context of its recent history.  Over the past 40 years, two separate internal armed conflicts resulted in war crimes and human rights abuses being committed by both sides in both conflicts.  In the vast majority of cases, no one has been held accountable for these crimes.  Apart from these armed conflicts, torture of detainees in custody is widespread and systemic.  Up to 100,000 enforced disappearances have been reported, both in connection with the conflicts and in their aftermath.  While no executions have been carried out in Sri Lanka since 1976, the death penalty remains on the books.  Draconian security legislation has facilitated arbitrary detention and torture.  Buddhist extremists in the Sinhalese majority community have attacked Christian and Muslim minorities in recent years, causing some deaths and extensive property damage, with the security forces standing by or on occasion being complicit in some attacks.  The Easter Sunday bombings in April 2019 saw the emergence in Sri Lanka for the first time of violence by members of a local Islamist group against members of the Christian minority and foreign tourists.

In the late 1980s, the People’s Liberation Front, a Sinhalese chauvinist group (known by their initials in Sinhala as the JVP), carried out an armed insurrection against the government.  The conflict saw targeted and indiscriminate killings of civilians, thousands of enforced disappearances of suspected JVP supporters, and arbitrary detentions and torture.  The insurrection ended with a government victory in 1990.

During 1983 – 2009, Sri Lanka was wracked by a civil war between the security forces (who are mostly Sinhalese) and the armed Tamil opposition group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who were seeking an independent state for the Tamil minority in the north and east of the island. The war ended in May 2009, with a government military victory over the LTTE.  A war crimes investigation by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights found in 2015 that both government forces and the LTTE had committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and other human rights violations.  One emblematic case of war crimes committed by the security forces is the murder of five Tamil students by the security forces in 2006 in the northeastern town of Trincomalee; see below for more information on the students (known as the “Trinco Five”).

Since 2009, cases of torture have continued to be reported, with no one being held responsible.  Journalists, activists and human rights defenders have been attacked.  At least 14 media workers have been the victims of unlawful killings since the beginning of 2006; one has allegedly disappeared in the custody of the security forces (see below for more information on the case of Prageeth Eknaligoda), while others have been tortured and arbitrarily detained.

Over the past two years, dissident voices and critics of the current government, including lawyers, journalists, human rights defenders, and victims of past abuses, have been targeted by the police, intelligence agencies, and pro-government media. In the months following the November 2019 presidential election, a number of organizations reported visits from intelligence officers who sought details of staff, programs and funding, in particular, organizations in the war-affected Northern and Eastern provinces of the country. Such visits are blatant attempts to harass and intimidate Sri Lankan civil society. 

On April 14, 2020, Hejaaz Hizbullah, a lawyer who has represented victims of human rights violations, was arrested under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act. The day before he was taken into custody, Hizbullah joined others in submitting a letter criticizing the denial of burial rights to the Muslim community under Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 regulations.  He was finally granted bail by the Court of Appeal on Feb. 7, 2022.  Amnesty has called for the charges against him to be dropped.   Also in April 2020, Ramzy Razeek, a social media commentator, was arbitrarily detained for a Facebook post in which he called on fellow Muslims in Sri Lanka to peacefully counter hate propaganda against Muslims by extremists from the Sinhalese majority community.  Although Razeek was released on bail on September 17, 2020, the charges against him remain pending; if convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison.

The United States should include Sri Lanka in an inter-agency atrocity prevention board review to create a set of policy recommendations that will prevent a return to grave human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. U.S. representatives must reiterate to the Sri Lankan government the importance of upholding human rights, including by attending court hearings in key cases such as the Trinco Five students, Prageeth Eknaligoda, Hejaaz Hizbullah, Ramzy Razeek and Ahnaf Jazeem (see below).  Congress should substantially increase civil society assistance for Sri Lankan human rights groups that are working on truth and reconciliation issues and protecting human rights defenders.

On May 14, 2021, Amnesty issued an Urgent Action appeal on behalf of Ahnaf Jazeem, a Sri Lankan poet who had been arbitrarily detained since May 16, 2020; he was subsequently released on bail on Dec. 16, 2021.

For the 16th anniversary on Jan. 2, 2022 of the killing of the Trinco Five students, some AIUSA activists created a 1:31 video about their case.  A link to the video is given below.

For the 12th anniversary on Jan. 24, 2022 of the enforced disappearance of journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda, activists from Amnesty International USA and Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand created two short videos about his case.  Links to both videos follow below.

On Jan. 14, 2022, Jim McDonald, AIUSA Sri Lanka Country Specialist, was interviewed on WRFI about the Trinco Five students and Prageeth Eknaligoda.  A link to that interview is given below.

On Jan. 27, 2022, Thyagi Ruwanpathirana, Amnesty’s Sri Lanka researcher, was interviewed by the Daily Mirror, a Sri Lankan paper, about the current state of human rights in Sri Lanka and Amnesty’s plans for future work on the country.  She was interviewed successively in English, Sinhala and Tamil.  Due to some technical problems, they don’t get started on the English interview until about 3:57.  After that English interview, they switch to Sinhala and then Tamil.  There’s further discussion in English starting at about 49:38.  A link to that interview is given below.

On Mar. 28, 2022, Amnesty International released its 2021/22 annual report detailing events and concerns around the world during 2021.  A link to the Sri Lanka entry can be found below.

On May 12, 2022, Amnesty issued an Urgent Action appeal for Mohamed Imran, a 23-year-old student arbitrarily detained since May 9, 2019.  A link to the appeal is below.

Please also see the links below for all the actions.  Thanks for any help you can give on the actions for each of the cases below.